Pressing The Flesh

Saturday, July 28, 2007

...it's as simple as that.

The fine folks who bring you PTF will unveil a new blog shortly that will be focused on this theme, but here's a tidbit in the meantime.

I have maintained for quite some time that Democrats would be foolish to nominate Clinton as their candidate, as there is no reasonable way to anticipate that she will actually win in a General Election.

While supporters will point to the inevitablitiy of her nomination, citing any number of polls which place her ahead of her closest rivals by double-digit leads (this memo, distributed earlier in the month from Clinton's Chief Strategist, Mark Penn, states "In recent election cycles, any time a candidate has had as much as 35 or 40 percent of the vote consistently across polls in a multi-candidate field, that candidate has gone on to win the nomination. In the last race, Joseph Lieberman was in the teens at this point while Walter Mondale’s numbers in the 1984 Democratic primary were comparable to Hillary’s now...." Why he would want to compare Clinton to Mondale is beyond me)... there is something else to consider.

Two days ago, the most recent Battleground poll, a bipartisan poll sponsored by the George Washington University, put some theoretical match-ups together to see what the results would be.

Here they are:

Giuliani - 49%; Clinton - 44%
Thompson - 46%; Clinton - 46%

Obama - 52%; Giuliani - 43%
Obama - 56%; Thompson - 35%

Dive a little deeper into the data, and you find even more interesting statistics. Looking at the favorable/unfavorable ratings, we see as follows:

FAVORABLES:
Barack Obama - 59%
John Edwards - 53%
Hillary Clinton - 50%

UNFAVORABLES:
Hillary Clinton - 48% (40% of whom registered as "strongly unfavorable")
John Edwards - 35% (22% of whom registered as "strongly unfavorable")
Barack Obama - 27% (15% of whom registered as "strongly unfavorable")

Despite this information, we continue to see most media portray Hillary Clinton as the frontrunner.

Why is that? Please... feel free to leave your comments. It's not a rhetorical question. Is it simple name recognition? Is it nostalgia for the Bill Clinton Administration? Is it a conspiracy?

Leave your comments, and tell me. Because I'm not sure I get it... yet.

Posted by FleshPresser at 4:42 PM /

3 Comments

Anonymous posted at 8:39 PM
great point, she can't win

Anonymous posted at 10:32 AM
I think it has something to do with the feminization of the news. Over the last 20 years, journalism has been taken over by women, and it's a fact that the majority of journalists vote Democratic.

But it also might be that she causes controversy, and isn't that really all that newspeople care about? Controversy = Ratings! Remember that "news" is a business. Their ultimate goal is to make money for their shareholders and boring, happy news doesn't sell.

sreichgott posted at 10:29 AM
I think it has something to do with the feminization of the news. Over the last 20 years, journalism has been taken over by women, and it's a fact that the majority of journalists vote Democratic.

I'm assuming this is snark. Because if it isn't, it's the silliest thing I've read in a long time. "It's a fact"? That's funny.

Please tell me it's snark.